Anyone
living near a major metropolitan airport has gazed up at the sky and seen
them: patchworks of crisscrossing contrails left by passing jetliners.
Most of us don’t give a second thought to this common sight of a scratched-up
sky. If we do, it’s likely to reflect on the explosion in air traffic
and its growing contribution to air pollution.

But for an expanding minority of Americans,
those hanging contrails represent something much more sinister than
increased carbon emissions. Since the late 1990s, a flourishing conspiracy
theory subculture has been ringing the alarm that many of these contrails
aren’t normal vapor-and-exhaust contrails at all. Rather, they are chemtrails,
mysterious and menacing chemical evidence of secret government programs
to modify the weather and depopulate the planet.

Investigation into, and speculation over,
the nature of these chemtrails has grown over the last decade from a
marginal belief into a millions-strong Transatlantic Truth Quest, with
chemtrails taking on the stature of celestial UFOs. If early UFO sightings
were the projection of early Cold War fears, chemtrails are the climate-change-age
corollary, with cultural panic over pollution and changing weather patterns
projected onto the clouds and planes in the sky.

As with flying saucers, hundreds of YouTube
clips purport to capture cities “getting pasted” by secret government
planes. Dozens of chemtrails Web sites compete for the loyalty and business
of a sprawling, gullible and increasingly global chemtrails flock. Like
the white lines that are its obsession, the chemtrails scene crisscrosses
with every other strand in the pantheon of cosmic conspiracy culture.
Most chemtrails sites, like the lovable dontchemtrailmebro.com, also
peddle in 9/11 Truth, alien contact, Northern Idaho survivalism and
the “suppressed” theories of the twin martyred wizards of etheric energy,
Wilhelm Reich and Nicolai Tesla.

The chemtrails scene is a loud saloon of
shouting New Age conspiracists spouting conflicting theories at the
bar, with the usual assortment of hucksters and Internet paranoids filling
the tables. The self-styled leaders of the movement are a diverse lot
but share a consensus starting point that thousands of jets are spraying
millions of gallons of “chemtrail soup” around the world on a daily
basis.

Chemtrails, they hold, are easily distinguished
from normal contrails by their longer duration and expansive dissipation
patterns. Most of the spraying is believed to take place at night over
the population centers of NATO countries, although some skywatchers
suspect Russia and China are being targeted as well. As for the content
of the soup and who is responsible for the program, that’s where things
get contentious. But the major theories are generally some variation
or combination of the following:

1)
U.S. oil companies are secretly spraying reflective chemicals in
the air to reduce global warming and thus reduce criticism of fossil fuels.

2)
A New World Order cabal -- also known as the Illuminati -- is spraying cities
with pathogens in the first of a two-stage depopulation program.

3)
NATO aircraft are involved in a top-secret weather-modification program, and/or
are refining a new-generation of high-frequency atmospheric weapons.

4)
The U.S. government is using commercial and military aircraft to assist and
monitor weather events like hurricanes and tornadoes in order to both destroy
enemies and pump money into the domestic economy through emergency spending/recovery
bills.

Scott Stevens is a leading proponent of the fourth
theory. A former TV meteorologist in Pocatello, Idaho, Stevens was fired when
he began giving national radio interviews on chemtrails. He took his severance
and moved to the foothills above Denver International Airport, where he now
conducts plain-sight research into chemtrails full time, maintains the chemtrails
site weatherwarsinfo.blogspot.com, and hosts “Amerika Now,” a local AM-radio
conspiracy culture talk show.

“I don’t buy the theory that chemtrails are a
pathogenic depopulation program,” says Stevens. “You don’t need to get so
high in the atmosphere for that. And you don’t need airplanes.”

Instead, he suspects a global cabal is using chemtrails
to maintain “situational awareness” of the atmosphere to better anticipate
and control the weather. “There isn’t a major weather event that can’t be
mitigated or exacerbated,” he says. “The chemtrails allow Them to
take a sort of MRI of the atmosphere.”

Stevens is certain that chemtrails are an essential
component of this mother of all weapons -- total weather control -- but admits
being stumped by the cloak around the ground operation that supports the program.
“Are these just painted-up commercial planes? Are there passengers aboard?
What I do know is that the shipping companies are part of it. FedEx and UPS
are compromised. Their chemtrails are egregious.”

Stevens believes President Barack Obama has been
briefed on the chemtrails program, but is agnostic about whether the new president
can break free from the powerful, entrenched interests behind the spraying.

The darkest of the chemtrails theories holds that
a massive fleet of planes, under the aegis of NATO, the U.S. Air Force or
the Illuminati, is spraying the soup as a part of a “binary population elimination
weapon.” Stage one involves passing pathogens to weaken humanity’s collective
immune system. Once general T-cell weakness is attained, we can expect aerial
dispersal of smallpox or anthrax. Supporters of this theory like to quote
fringe independent journalists and survivalist rags like the Idaho Observer.
A typical comment left under a chemtrails YouTube clip warns viewers that
they are now breathing “ethylene dibromide, nano-particulates of aluminum
and barium, cationic polymer fibers with unidentified bioactive material,
and tiny parasitic nematode eggs of some type.”

“The chemtrails are part of a genocidal program
to reduce the global population by up to 90 percent,” says Ken Adachi, who
subscribes to the depopulation theory and runs educate-yourself.org. “The
Illuminati only want 500,000 people on the planet, maximum. Chemtrails are
one of the vectors. Poisoning people is easier than rounding everyone up in
liquidation camps.”

Adachi, who keeps a daily log of chemtrails activity
in Orange County, Calif., says hundreds of people write him every week with
stories of spraying over their communities. He finds hope in the radicalizing
nature of their chemtrails discovery. What starts as a stand-alone concern
soon leads to the question “Why?” and a shocking self-education in the reality
of the Illuminati’s New World Order.

Often the various theories will be thrown together
into a chemtrails conspiracy soup. “Welcome to the brave new world of toxic
barium skies, weather control, mind control and population control through
the use of chemtrails modulated with electromagnetic frequencies generated
by HAARP,” says a chemtrails YouTube clip.

If you don’t know what HAARP (High Frequency Active
Auroral Research Program)is, you have so much to learn.

* * *

The dean of the chemtrails conspiracy scene is
William Thomas, the Canadian journalist who coined the term. Thomas has written
a book on the subject, Chemtrails Confirmed, and produced a documentary
film, Mystery Lines In the Sky. (All majors accepted at www.willthomasonline.net.)
Thomas has reported finding over 300 types of virally mutated fungi in the
chemtrail fallout, which he believes is a project with multiple goals. In
an interview with the online conspiracy radio program, “The Jeff Rense Program,”
Thomas mused that possible actors ranged from the “oil industry mafia” to
the United States military. But even after all of his groundbreaking research,
Thomas admits that he is still waiting for “a real, honest-to-God whistle-blower”
to step forward and connect all the dots.

Some thought that moment had finally arrived in
2002, when Dennis Kucinich introduced a House bill that sought to ban space
weapons. Tucked deep into a subclause in the first draft of H.R. 2977 was
the word “chemtrails,” listed among the weapons and practices Kucinich wanted
outlawed. It was the first time the word had ever appeared in any sort of
official document in Washington.

For the civically challenged chemtrails scene,
the event was tantamount to the United States government officially admitting
that the program was “real.” Although Kucinich quickly removed the word and
denied responsibility for the original inclusion, chemtrails enthusiasts continue
to dog the congressman wherever he speaks. In Europe, similar alarms were
set off when Erik Meijer, a Dutch Socialist member of parliament, submitted
an official query to European Parliament in Brussels, demanding an investigation
into the phenomenon.

The Kucinich bill wasn’t the first time someone
in government acknowledged the chemtrails conspiracy theory. Far from it.
State agencies have given more careful attention to chemtrails than any other
conspiracy theory, after UFOs. And they have addressed its activists with
a seriousness it is impossible to imagine with regard to, say, 9/11 Truthers.

In 2000, the EPA, NASA, FAA and the National Oceanic
and Atmospheric Administration issued a joint “Aircraft Contrails Factsheet”
that sought to address the fears and claims of the increasingly rambunctious
chemtrails crowd. The six-page illustrated report explains the science of
contrails, such as the role humidity plays in the variance between how long
contrails linger and spread, sometimes forming cirrus cloud cover; and their
zero impact on human health.

The report admits a link between contrails and
climate change, but says this is not the purpose of the global air travel
industry. The EPA report also includes photos of contrail clusters of the
kind found on chemtrails sites. Although the word “chemtrails” does not appear
in the report, the structure and tone make it clear that the exercise is aimed
at the chemtrails conspiracists, delivered as a school nurse might talk to
a student about excessive masturbation in a roundabout way in order not to
embarrass herself or the student.

The Air Force, on the other hand, has no qualms
about talking straight to the chemtrailers. The USAF followed the EPA’s multi-agency
report with its own 24-page fact sheet on emissions. The report included a
section titled “The ‘Chemtrail’ Hoax.” Here the military bluntly addresses
the idea that “the Air Force [is] involved in spraying the U.S. population
with mysterious substances [and] conducting weather-modification experiments.”
It explains that long-lasting contrails are not new and have been under official
study since the 1950s, and that the grid patterns highlighted by chemtrailers
result from the National Airspace System being structured on a four-directional
grid with aircraft flying at designated increments of elevation.

Inevitably, the official “denials” only served
to further excite the chemtrails legions.

More popular than ever, chemtrails is the perfect
21st century conspiracy. It combines the 20th century fear of poisonous fallout
with anxiety over very real changes in climate and pollution of the atmosphere,
including by some of the very toxins and metals said to be ingredients in
“chemtrails soup.”

Like most conspiracies, there are grains of truth
in its basic components. The planet is under attack. The climate is undergoing
drastic changes. Governments do lie. Pollution is causing more and more respiratory
illness. The military does have secret weapons programs, some of them involving
high-frequency weapons and weather modification.

How individuals choose to deal with these truths
-- and the larger context of civilizational crisis and individual powerlessness
-- is up to them, of course. But there are healthier and much more relaxing
ways of projecting skyward than imagining genocidal Illuminatic air fleets
spraying toxic soup.

There is one good alternative we all learned in
boy and girlhood, before computers and Internet-driven conspiracy theories
began draining so much of our personal and cultural energy. It involves going
outside on a nice day, finding a warm patch of grass and watching the clouds
(contrails, too) as they spread, crisscross and drift.

It’s amazing what we can see in the clouds. Frolicking bunnies, mating
mountain goats, leaping unicorns, comforting angels. All sorts of wonderful,
fantastical things.